some things about cameras...

an image or video recording may or may not tell the truth, which is a secret sealed in bodies.
similarly, there are physical and psychological complications to authoritative perspective, which is an exercise in power.
a camera is more than a use-value; it is a symbol that transforms what is around it, reducing it to a single dimension, but it is also the messenger at his trickiest. the privileged one who wields the camera is in control of the message, the characters, and to some degree the audience.
new media technology is a social trigger that elicits reactionary performance. an authentic filmmaker joins in with those around her or him to establish agent-subject relationships.
image tends to drift toward the exploitative because of the historical socio-economic relationships. means informs perspective. similarly, perspective may or may not conceal means.
a documentary with integrity will show the experience of the film-making process, with complete cast of characters, rather than a short history of subject/object relationships.
in this sense, image might brim with humanity rather than stifle and streamline it.
film is not democratic, it is only despotic or anarchic.
sometimes, it is the jester.

Stale

All systems fall apart when faced with themselves. This process can be likened to the cycles of the phoenix. Similarly, theoretical systems compulsively disassemble themselves. Disintegration is inseparable from experiential realization of the Project; open hypothesis dies without experimentation.

This is a cusp, an edge where we stand - and how steadily?

it is a rare beast who prepares for the future falling.

It is not in our nature to inquire into the meaning of being; this inquiry may be more akin to metaphysical regression (i.e. implosion) which is the development of the narrative of philosophy’s historicity. To inquire into fundamental meaning is inherently to reach beyond the human sphere of understanding, into what could be called Nothing. This unknown is simultaneously unknowable - and how arrogant to think that we have been given all necessary tools for cosmic comprehension. Knowing must take place as embodied and thus flawed. Thought alleviates the limitations of sensory awareness. Consciousness is a mere lick of infinity. We stumble along.

tumult of inclusivity/exclusivity paradigm

Dependence should not be governed by the economy but trust, mutual inter-faith. Regardless, financial power in the form of unequal distribution of wealth is inherently destabilizing, much as unequal distribution of political power in the symbolic form of voting led to the rise of social movements, collectives of alternative influence seeking to challenge foundational assumptions of societies. Physical environments change to reflect the distribution of power in general, as does thought itself; power must be realized in some form, be it social, economic, cultural or beyond. This realization will always be in action, there will always be shifting, as changing environments play off of one-another in us, engendering new possibilities as we constantly construct meaning from observation and interpretation. Still, the power flux is slow, as slow as we are to come to understanding and communicate it to others. Mutual interests are vital to maintaining power, yet these cause coagulation, suspicion and unrest. It is ill-advised to resist the flow of history. The smaller one tries to make the margin of error, the greater the potentially disastrous consequences. The more control one exerts, the more unprepared one is for the uncontrollable. Power is never absolute, always asymptotic. Power’s antithesis is a seed within itself.
Separation is always segregation.

castles in the sand

The symbolic importance of acting. Repression/Dependency complex.
The relational aspects of globalization, i.e. “the market”(place) where interchange occurs. As the neural pathways of the brain are complex in meaning but simple in conduct - bearing messages like Hermes - so global exchange functions the same: we bear the economy, the cyclical process of production has turned us into symbols of itself. Individuals represent functions of multinational corporate and state apparatuses, structures that map artificial geographies of virtual exchange, layering them over populations like a blanket of digital snow. When errors in the system occur, as they do periodically, the role of the state as capital’s fail-safe is clarified; in the name of the national economy the adrenaline is administered, shock-therapy, and the people are left scrambling in the reorganization - while the pulse has once again begun.
It is the most insidious trait of capitalism to connect us with invisible thread, not invisible because it does not exist but because it is removed from our presence, we have no contact with it, we are alienated from it; that thread traces the movement of material-historical production. We are connected to others by the products we use or consume. It is this basic network of production that has evolved from the industrial capitalism of the 18th century into a global system of institutionalized hegemony and political repression.
While people remain ideologically divided in many ways, imagined or not (it is the imagination that matters) there are yawning gaps in communication and dialogue, potential regions of intersubjective recognition and material cooperation which might begin to break down the mysterious Other; these spaces are both physical and psychological.
“During the process of its historical development, the industrial bourgeoisie has repeatedly had to find new solutions to the following problems: how to buy raw materials for the factory at low prices; how to enable the working class to feed itself cheaply, in order to keep wages low; how to create a supply situation in which it would be possible to absorb a growing proportion of the rural population in the factories. These problems have been resolved by the industrial bourgeoisie by the use of State power in several new forms, but always on the basis of an ever more implacable subjugation of a growing proportion of the world’s population, incorporated as direct colonies, protectorates or spheres of influence in the metropolitan States’ systems of domination.” Gramsci, p.301

Ashes

It is hard for me to know what moves around me in any other way than what I have been taught. Description clouds the opposite horizon, which is always the identical horizon, nothing other than itself recognizing us in consciousness. But we are pulled apart in determining our own differences. Words and bodies are the real retardation, facing both inward and outward like Janus clumsily trying to maintain a fragile balance; self-regulation, not mimicry or blind trial and error, but awareness of our own turning and reflections. We don’t have any direction at all except what is our own, though we may not recognize it, and the world has borne us as fruit, and the knowledge it holds, so we carry mirrors in our souls wherever we walk. How can we say one is blessed, another cursed? The differentiation is momentary, cosmic only in its hilarity. Stars are bursting and collapsing as I write. Perhaps if we were to retreat to a place without any light at all, we might defy a contradiction, take the next dusty step.
‘The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange — in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man’s “knowing” by his “being”, instead of, as heretofore, his “being” by his “knowing”.’ Engels, Letters